TMR: Woman Raises Money To Pay For $362 Uber Ride, Rand Paul Unsure How He Feels About Ebola Quarantines, Amazon-CIA $600 Million Deal Facing Scrutiny
Have no fear, The Monday edition of The Morning Roar is here!The Woman Who Raised Money To Pay For $362 Uber Ride Is An IdiotThe interwebz have been buzzing this weekend with reactions to the story of a twenty-six year old woman from Baltimore that had a few too many drinks, called Uber for a ride home during peak hours, and awoke the next day to an unexpected $362 charge.Instead of accepting the financial blow she was dealt, which was a direct result of her poor decision-making, the young woman turned to the website Go Fund Me to crowd fund the money she lost as a result of her poor choices. Before I judge this young woman for passing her problems onto others and before we go blaming Uber for what some may call “price gouging” let’s at least hear the woman’s version of the events.Business Insider first broke the story. The following is their report of what she wrote on her Go Fund Me site:
Last night was Halloween. Great time. Today is my 26th birthday. Not so great time. I live in Baltimore and went out with my friends to celebrate my birthday at midnight. When 3 AM rolled around, I suggested we take an Uber hole to avoid drunk driving (#responsibility/#MADD). I live 22 minutes , tops, from the party I was leaving.When I awoke this morning, I heard a friend talking about how outrageous Uber rates were the night before (9x original rate). I checked my bank account to, unbeknownst to me, I see a charge for $362. Not only is it my 26th birthday, it is rent day. My rent is $450 and I can no longer pay it today due to this completely outrageous charge.I have had little to no luck in disputing this transaction.I waitress at two restaurants and freelance for a City Paper. I worked incredibly hard this week to be able to enjoy my birthday this weekend. This misunderstanding has cost me 80% of the funds I have to my name (embarrassingly so) and I spent a good two hours of my birthday crying over it.I feel taken advantage of and cheated by the Uber name. $367 for a 20 minute ride should never be justified, even on Halloween. Please donate even just $1 if you think this is utter and complete bullshit and also hilarious and very, very depressing at the same time.
First, let’s take a quick look at this woman’s financial situation. She admits that this transaction with Uber, for $367, cost her 80% of her total funds. With a little bit of math, we can surmise that her bank balance should have sat somewhere around $458, prior to the fateful Uber “price gouge.”This woman, identified only as Gabby in the Business Insider article, realistically only had $8 dollars to her name when accounting for her rent due the next day. There isn’t a ride service in the United States that would have taken her on her 20 minute drive for $8 dollars. In her financial situation, she probably shouldn’t be leaving her house for social purposes, let alone getting blacked out drunk and wasting money on any sort of ride home. The people donating to this woman’s cause are only reinforcing her irresponsible behavior.Now let’s take a look at Uber’s role in the story.Uber is painted as the bad guy for charging such an exorbitant rate during peak hours. But doesn’t their fee reflect supply and demand? Uber doesn’t have a monopoly on the transportation marketplace. There are many transportation alternatives for moving passengers from point A to point B late on a Friday or Saturday night.Not all of the options provide the same certainty as ride sharing with Uber or Lyft, which operate a pricing system that raises rates during peak hours. For example, a taxi would probably have been less expensive than an Uber or Lyft ride during peak hours, but this low price leads to very high demand for taxi service. Therefore, it is normally very hard to find a taxi late on a Friday or Saturday night in many areas. It's simple economics really.Here's a picture of the image that appears on your phone when booking a ride with Uber during peak hours. It is not in Uber's best business interests to mislead their clientele.
The woman in this story could have called a taxi service, but she probably would have been stuck waiting for hours and it’s possible a taxi would have never come at all. Instead she called Uber, and promptly received a ride home. If she had been coherent at the time of the ride, then she could have refused service for the quoted rate, or not requested the ride in the first place.My advice to this girl is simple. If you have a problem with transportation service in your city, start a competing service. This will increase the supply of rides and lower the overall cost to the consumer. Maybe “Gabby” will choose to do this with the left-over funds from her disgraceful GoFund.Me campaign. I won’t hold my breath.Rand Paul Unsure How He Feels About Ebola QuarantinesRand Paul was all over the Sunday morning talks shows this week making appearances on CNN’s “State of the Union”, NBC’s “Meet the Press”, and CBS New’s “Face the Nation.”During Senator Paul’s appearance on “State of the Union” he was at best non-committal and at worst evasive when questioned by host Candace Crowley regarding how he thinks Ebola quarantines should be handled.Watch below from CNN:Rand Paul says, “The Libertarian in me is sort of horrified at indefinitely detaining or detaining anyone without trial.” He made this comment when discussing nurse Kaci Hickox who has fought government enforced quarantine first in New Jersey, then in Maine.Rand’s ambiguous response to the question seems aimed to appease both his supporters that back a strong government response to the Ebola threat domestically and those libertarian leaning folks that are wary of indefinite government detention. In trying to appease both, Rand failed to present a way to manage the threat of the spread of the Ebola virus in a free society.Don’t worry Rand. We have your back here at Lions of Liberty.In a free society, that is not run by coercive governments, people in their local communities, towns, or even city-states could jointly agree on certain rules to which they consent to be used to govern the use of their property. These rules could include agreed upon vaccines or exposure to certain viruses that would require individuals to be quarantined. Since the individuals in the town or city-state previously voluntarily gave their consent to abide by the rules of the area, they would be legally obligated to comply.Problem solved Rand, everybody wins.Amazon-CIA $600 Million Deal Facing ScrutinyActivists are pushing back against the cozy relationship between Amazon and the CIA.From the Institute for Public Accuracy:
A billboard challenging Amazon to fully disclose the terms of its $600 million contract to provide cloud computing services for the Central Intelligence Agency has been unveiled at a busy intersection near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.The billboard’s launch — asking “the $600 million question: What’s the CIA Doing on Amazon’s Cloud?” — marks the escalation of a campaign by the online activist organizations RootsAction.org and ExposeFacts.org. The groups are calling for accountability from Amazon in an effort to inform the public of serious privacy implications of the Amazon-CIA collaboration. (ExposeFacts.org is a project of the Institute for Public Accuracy.)The positioning of the 48-foot-wide billboard on Amazon’s doorstep at Fairview Avenue and Valley Street in Seattle follows a RootsAction petition calling for Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos to make a legally binding commitment to Amazon’s commercial customers that it will not provide customer data to the CIA.Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer. “The same company that stores vast quantities of customer records and even provides cloud storage services also stores the CIA’s surveillance data — yet the actual terms of the Amazon-CIA agreement are secret,” said Norman Solomon, executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy and a co-founder of RootsAction.org.To see the billboard, click here.
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